26 days gone, 65 to go.

I wrote this letter in November in prison but realised as I was writing it that it probably wouldn’t make it past the prison censor. So instead of posting it, and taking the risk it would end up in the screws’ wastepaper basket, I hung onto it for later. So I’m now typing it onto my blog more than two months later.


Sunday, 13th November 2005. 26 days gone, 65 to go.

Stuart Highway
Darwin Correctional Centre
PO Box 1407
Darwin 0801

Dear Gaz,

What a nice surprise! Got your letter, the 9th one, just before lock-up for the day at 3pm. In this block you never know what time you’re going to get mail! In M Block it was always at the morning muster at around 9am.

Yeah, I’ve been stressed out. That comes from being constantly being at the mercy of other people’s authority. I’m constantly being told off by stern-faced prison officers for minor infractions, and told that I should know the routine by now. There’s always the implicit threat of being sent to the dreaded punishment block. Everything must be done exactly as it’s supposed to be, at exactly the right time.

I can see how places like this do people’s heads in. Some people turn to Christianity to try to make sense of the authoritarian nightmare their lives have been turned into.

This prison is one huge joke. Sometimes I feel like laughing about it, only it’s PEOPLE’S LIVES they’re joking with. The joke wears thin after a while. The idea is to break the individual’s spirit and make people into passive robots who don’t think for themselves any more. They only know how to take orders. Obey or else! The system is stronger than you, therefore it is right and you must have done something bad to end up in here.

That’s funny, I don’t remember doing anything wrong. I remember making a stand for human rights and fighting some morons in uniforms. I remember telling a cretin of a judge that the government with its police was the guilty party, not the Network Against Prohibition. I remember accusing uniformed morons of lying. It wasn’t so much a matter of a shattered windscreen, which they never proved beyond reasonable doubt that I was responsible for anyway, as they are supposed to according to their own system of law.

It was a matter of taking a stand against the stupidity and the hypocrisy, the racism and the capitalist hierarchy that the Northern Territory Government’s drug laws are a part of.

If I’d told that judge I was remorseful, that I sincerely regretted my actions on 12 October 2002, that I was sorry for the trouble I’d caused, and pleaded guilty, I wouldn’t be sitting here in this cell now.

But why should I cave into fascism? Why should I ‘repent’ and say, like Winston Smith in Orwell’s 1984, that now I know I love Big Sister Clare Martin, and Big Brother Peter Toyne? Do they think they’re teaching me a lesson by keeping me in here for 3 months? The only lesson I’m learning is what a bunch of fools they are, what a colossal waste of taxpayers’ dollars and natural resources this whole prison system is, and how they are even more evil and corrupt than I thought.

Other prisoners know this too, even if they don’t say so. It makes me sad, and angry, to see people’s lives being ruined, by being kept, not just for a month or three like me, but for YEARS, in this horrible, depressing institution.

Stuart Highway